The President

Description

At 82, the former premier lives in alert and suspicious retirement - self exile - on the Normandy coast, writing his anxiously anticipated memoirs and receiving visits from statesmen and biographers. In his library is the self-condemning, handwritten confession of the premier's former attache, Chalamont, hidden between the pages of a sumptuously produced work of privately printed pornography - a confession that the premier himself had dictated and forced Chalamont to sign. Inspired by French Premier Clemenceau, this is a psychological masterpiece.

Georges Simenon (1903-1989) is the author of The Widow, The Engagement, The Strangers in the House, Red Lights, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By, Tropic Moon, Monsieur Monde Vanishes, Dirty Snow, and Three Bedrooms in Manhattan, all available from NYRB Classics.;;Robert Baldick (1927-1972) was a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, a joint editor of Penguin Classics, and one of Britain's leading French scholars.

"It is impossible not to admire the accuracy, the unfailing psychological insight, the unfaltering eye for the small but convincing human details that he brings to his stories of men obsessed." -Life magazine (1958) "Since most Simenon characters are driven and obsessive, their actions are outside the constraints of ordinary life and, as such, are of striking ethical and psychological interest... Simenon has often been compared to Dostoyevsky..." -New York Times